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Pop Culture Criticism by Natalie Luhrs

My garden, y’all. It’s just such a source of happiness for me. It’s so green and my echinacea and coreopsis and my roses and hydrangeas are getting ready to bloom and it’s so exciting.

Less exciting is my damn neighbor. While my spouse was dealing with some weeding in the backyard, she came over to yell at him about our lawn mowing guys blowing dust and debris (presumably lawn clippings) into her yard and seriously, she is complaining about dust. She asked that we request they not do that and my response was, “Just as soon as she stops blowing leaves into our yard every autumn,” by which I mean never. There was also something about “black shredded paper” that I don’t even understand because we don’t have persistent litter in our yard and when there is litter, I pick it up.

She also Monsanto’d a bunch of weeds in her rock beds today and put a child–presumably one of her grandchildren–to work pulling out their desiccated corpses with only nitrile gloves for protection. Her annuals look nice, though.

Also! I will be at Balticon this coming weekend! I’ll be there Friday afternoon through roughly noon on Monday. My plan is to take it easy and mostly chill in the bar area and I would LOVE to catch up with people.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I finally finally finally finished Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human. It was pedantic, polemic, and patronizing. It was poorly written and poorly argued. There are good ideas in it, but it’s like being lectured at by your cranky uncle when you make an offhand complaint about algebra being useless when you’re 12 years old (true story). I think Rushkoff believes he’s organizing the peasants to storm the castle, but the thing is thins: anyone who’s bought the book is already on board with his central thesis. Less lecturing, more action. And more awareness that not everyone is a white dude.

In the same vein, I’ve started reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and while it covers much of the same ground as the Rushkoff, it does it in a way that acknowledges the existence of privilege and varying sizes of the margin available to people. It also feels more grounded–both in the way that Odell uses examples from her home, the SF Bay Area, but also in her connection to other the people carving out what she calls a “third space” in years past. I am still waiting for her to mention that Thoreau’s mom did his laundry and fed him, though. But overall, I’m finding Odell’s approach much more resonant.

And I’m still plugging away at Astounding and continue to be astounded by the general douchebaggery of Heinlein and Hubbard and the gee-whiz keenness of Asimov. And appalled by the fact that Campbell’s hard-on for “scientific accuracy” in SF is still something that white dudes prattle on about at conventions. It’s an absorbing read, for sure.

I have such a pile of physical books to read–mostly non-fiction. I’m really resentful of how much of my time the Rushkoff book took to read; I have another book by a white dude in the stack that I’ve been slowly picking at since like January and come one, white dudes, step up your game with the non-fiction already.

Work

Spin is 12 days away. We cannot authorize any projects right now because Finance hasn’t done what they need to do (which they were supposed to do by last Wednesday). I have fallen into the PowerPoint abyss and I may never emerge (you try creating a job aid for an unnecessarily complex tool in fewer than ten pages, I dare you). I’ve been making a lot of tongue in cheek references to the five stages of grief and they’re becoming less tongue in cheek the closer we get to spin. I was in acceptance, but I’ve regressed to bargaining with moments of anger.

Medical

Big week this week: regular three month check in with my psychiatrist and an intake appointment with my hematologist. And I’m getting yet another paracentesis this afternoon; I’m betting on at least 4L of fluid, if not closer to 5L, considering how protuberant my hernia has become (yet another thing I’m going to have to get fixed). I’ve been feeling pretty good most of the time, which has been lovely and which has further cemented my belief that if I can get this fluid situation dealt with I’d be much closer to feeling normal (and maybe able to exercise).

Productivity

The big rocks/top three strategy is working well at work–at this point it’s basically one big rock surrounded by a bunch of pebbles as they come up. Still kind of flailing around at home–I am finding that I don’t want to take the planner out of my purse when I get home–so I need to figure out what to do there. Mainly, things are holding together and we are getting things done that need to be done.

This week I acquired not one but two flamingos for my garden. They’re both metal and have little solar panel and LED lighting in their bodies–so they glow at night. They make me happy. My garden, in general, makes me happy.

I also went to The Head Nut with my friend E! this weekend and bought entirely too much tea. So far, it’s all delicious. Since hot coffee doesn’t really agree with me anymore and while I can and do drink cold brew, I’ve been drinking a lot of tea and tisanes because they tend to be a bit easier on my stomach. My morning wake up tea is usually either St. Dalfour Ceylon or Darjeeling and I’m trying to switch to tisanes in the afternoon and evenings. I like berry and citrus tisanes the best, so if anyone has recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

Reading/Watching/Listening

It’s been a slow week on the media consumption front–I’ve been spending a lot of time playing a jigsaw puzzle game on my iPad. It’s oddly soothing. I also just downloaded Stardew Valley because I like games where you build things.

I’m still plugging away at Astounding and find myself utterly fascinated by what an uptight jerk Heinlein seems to be. Like he pushed Isaac Asimov to come to work on Yom Kippur after Asimov had signed a letter proposing that Jewish employees work on Christmas and instead get Yom Kippur off–which seems entirely reasonable to me. But because Asimov wasn’t an observant Jew, Heinlein basically backed him into a logical corner on the subject. Nevala-Lee calls this “a certain meanness of spirit” and he’s absolutely right.

Rachel Held Evans’s Searching for Sunday is also in regular rotation. It’s really interesting and it’s making me think a lot about intentional communities and how we welcome new people into them. There are a lot of connections with fandom, I think.

And finally, I’m reading a book on instructional design for work, Design for How People Learn and it’s really great. Very engaging and I’m learning a lot. And that’s a great way to segue into how work’s been going.

Work

The trainings I’ve been writing are almost done. I spent most of the week working on them and while I have a little bit more work to do on them both, I feel pretty good about what I’ve accomplished. My focus on the training is basically “what do the users need to learn to successfully complete tasks in these systems” so I’m leaving out a lot of the whys and history of the tools, which means I’m butting heads with a colleague who feels the need to go into long-winded explanations about why things are set up the way they are. We’re so lucky to have an experienced instructional designer on our team; I’ve learned so much from her.

Making

I made a few ink and wash drawings this week that I’m really happy with; one was on a notecard which has been sent to its recipient and the other is in my sketchbook where I look at it with satisfaction every so often. I’m also fiddling around with drawing cartoon people and animals, so that’s fun.

I read Austin Kleon’s Keep Going last week and it really drove home the rightness of my decision to stop sharing my art on Instagram. I think I’ve managed to unfollow all the people who made me feel insecure in my own voice and my feed is now much more inspiring–my friends’ art, their kids, flowers, that sort of thing. I think I’ll start sharing again eventually, but for now, my art is for me.

Medical

I only had one medical appointment this past week! It was my usual weekly hour with my therapist. My therapist is so great, y’all.

But it was so nice to not feel like I had a shitty second unpaid job and on top of that, I felt pretty good for most of the week, even though I’m accumulating fluid in my abdomen (again, still). Three weeks until that’s (hopefully) resolved.

I only have a therapy appointment this week, too. Next week I see my psychiatrist and have my first appointment with my hematologist. Whee!

Productivity

As you can see, I got a lot done. I experimented with putting only my three highest priority items each day in my Hobonichi and that worked out really well. I helped resolve an irritating situation at work with aplomb and I’m keeping up with things. around the house, I managed to so some weeding earlier this week, but as I said above, spending a lot of time with the jigsaw puzzle game on my iPad, so while it’s technically wasting time, it also helps me to feel calmer and like I’m accomplishing something, so it is useful.

I’m writing this on a cold and blustery Sunday afternoon. It was beautiful yesterday, but it looks like a lot of rain this week, which’ll be good for my garden–which I’ve finally finished for the year. We’ve doubled the number of plants and it just looks so good. It makes me bounce with happiness to see it. And I see it a lot, so there’s a lot of happiness going on.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I spent a lot of time reading this week.

Still plugging away at Nevala-Lee’s Astounding on my lunch breaks and enjoying it tremendously, especially the bits about Campbell and Heinlein’s bromance.

I also read Ursula Vernon’s unpublished until last year first novel, BlackDogs. Written when she was a teen, it is very much a first novel and I applaud her bravery in publishing it. Because it’s basically a D&D campaign in novel form. At least that’s what it felt like to me. You could see bits of her voice peeking out here and there, but there are a lot of flaws. Thin characterizations, inconsistent pacing, and all sorts of other problems you’d expect to find in a novel written by a teenager. Anyhow, I really don’t want to spend a whole lot of time talking about the problems because of the sort of book it is and anyhow, Ursula’s a friend.

Then I blew my way through Miss Prim’s Greek Island Fling, which I’d bought after reading Miss Bates’s review of it. It was a fun read and I appreciated that the text explicitly acknowledged the absurd amount of privilege both the main characters have–wealthy, white, loving families–while still giving them some real problems to work through. This was exactly the book I needed to read as I dealt with some difficult medical things this week (more on that below).

And finally, I’ve started reading Rachel Held Evans’s Searching for Sunday. I’d read her A Year of Biblical Womanhood several years ago and had been meaning to read her other books for a while and just hadn’t gotten to it. When I read about her untimely death yesterday, I decided to make reading at least one of her other books a priority.

I did a little bit of podcast listening this week, too. I am perpetually behind on podcasts–I keep thinking I should unsubscribe from a bunch–but one I’m almost always caught up on is Jocelyn K. Glei’s Hurry Slowly, which is always thoughtful and informative. The most recent episode is a wide-ranging interview with Debbie Millman of Design Matters (another favorite). The most interesting part for me, was the discussion around whether people are sprinter or marathoners when in comes to creative work; Millman is a marathoner and Glei is a sprinter. It’s not a perfect distinction, but I’m finding it a useful framework to use as I think about both my work and my hobbies.

Work

I had a really good week at work! I managed to fall into a flow state a few times and it was a glorious feeling. More, please.

Making

I haven’t been doing much with yarn lately (my main project is a crocheted afghan, it’s going to be great when it’s done), but I have been doing a bit more drawing and painting. And I’ve decided that I am probably not going to share what I’m working on–not because I think what I’m doing is terrible, but because it sets up a lot of comparisons and that puts me in an unhealthy mental place. I’m working on unfollowing all the art Instagrams I follow unless they’re run by people I know or people whose work I find genuinely inspiring. I find the process videos particularly insidious for some reason. I may feel like sharing again at some point in the future, but for now, my art practice needs to be for me.

Medical

On Monday, I only had one appointment. By the end of the day on Friday, I’d been to four. And added another Expensive Medication (Eliquis) to the rotation (I have been feeling better since I started on it, I have no idea why).

Nothing new is going on, we’re just making progress on a few things. I had an appointment with my primary care doctor to go over my meds as I’ve been having a lot of low blood pressure readings (this is new and exciting!) and to talk about an old injury that I’d like to get dealt with at some point.

Then I had another paracentesis, where another 4L of fluid was suctioned out of my abdomen. And then on Friday, after my morning therapy appointment, I had a consult with a vascular surgeon about the blood flow situation in my gut which is causing the fluid accumulation. I have a much better understanding of what’s going on now and I am scheduled to go in for a procedure in early June to basically plumb my splenic and portal veins. I will be staying overnight in hospital, mainly because of my history.

But on that note, I just want to mention that the healthcare expenses are mounting. I have about $300 left in my HSA and I have new charges from the hospital for about that amount. I’m still paying off about $2,000 from last year’s hospitalization and I have $2,000 to go before I hit my out of pocket maximum. We’re managing, but high deductible plans are bullshit and my employer should know better. I’m just grateful that I only cover myself on my insurance–otherwise the deductible and out of pocket maximum would be entirely unmanageable.

I’m talking about this not to ask for money, but to just note that worrying about the cost of treatment is not something anyone should ever have to think about. Ever.

Productivity

Still struggling with executive function and writing things down, but I’m getting everything done that needs to get done. And I do tend to write little notes about how each day is going which helps me to spot patterns. And I get to use my pretty pretty pretty fountain pens, which makes me happy. I’m really aiming to use productivity tools not for the sake of productivity itself but in order to be able to enjoy my life without worrying that I’ve left something undone.

My procedure last week went really well. I got my stent out and we’ve identified the root cause of the fluid buildup (portal vein thrombosis) and I have a bunch of doctor appointments to start tackling that. I had a paracentesis earlier this week and that’s given me some relief, but considering that my previous one was only 3 weeks ago, I have concerns about how long it will be until I start accumulating again.

But I’ve been doing a lot of reading and journaling and life’s been pretty good this week. I’ll take it.

We had all the boxwoods and azaleas and random evergreens taken out of our yard this week and the crew also weeded and mulched and everything looks so good. I want to get two more bee balms and something in the yellow-orange family to fill in a hole where the moonbeam coreopsis was (didn’t make it through the winter and I’m not too upset about it as I didn’t care for the foliage). I’m thinking either rudbeckia or a yellow echinacea cultivar, depending on what the garden center has in stock.

I’ve also gone ahead and hired people to mow my lawn this year so I don’t have to expend the emotional labor on fretting over what my awful neighbor will think and on chivvying P. into mowing the lawn (which he hates to do, which I do understand, but it’s gotta get done).

Reading/Watching/Listening

Went to see Avengers: Endgame Friday afternoon–I enjoyed it immensely and while I found the fat jokes troubling and not funny, I didn’t find them as upsetting as I thought I would, based on the social media rhetoric surrounding the issue. I found the film to be a generally satisfying ending to this phase of the MCU and there were a couple of moments that just cracked my heart open, there’s really no other way to describe the feeling.

I also read Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning and liked it an awful lot. It was a super fast read and, in some ways, reminded me of the early Anita Blake books–like the first three or four. But more self-aware, in a lot of ways. I really loved that there wasn’t a Diné to English dictionary at the end and that the meaning of specific words was left as an exercise for the reader to either puzzle out or research. The worldbuilding is fascinating and I’m looking forward to reading more.

Still plugging away at Nevala-Lee’s Astounding and so far my biggest takeaway is that John W. Campbell was an egotistical jerkface. Possibly moreso that L. Ron Hubbard, if such a thing is even possible.

Work

Finished up a few projects this week, made some incremental progress on a few others. Slow and steady.

Medical

The big news of the week is this: my stent is out. I had an endoscopic procedure on Thursday to remove it and it went well. My GI doctor let me bring it home and it’s sitting on my desk next to the keyboard right now.

The other news is that I need another paracentesis (so. much. fluid. y’all) and I’m getting an appointment with a hematology/vascular doctor. I was supposed to have the info I needed for both these things on Friday, but didn’t hear from my GI doctor’s admin, so I have to call tomorrow. I also have to call the pharmacy to find out what the situation is with the delay on filling the Eliquis scrip that was sent over on Thursday; my insurance covers it, so it shouldn’t be a problem. And I need to call my mail order pharmacy about my Creon refill because their website wants me to pay $650 for it and nope, I’ve met my deductible and it should only be $125 for a 3 month supply until I hit my out of pocket maximum (at which point it’ll be “free”).

I felt fine on Friday, but I’ve spent most of Saturday and Sunday in bed feeling miserable and sorry for myself.

I’ve also decided that being sick is basically a full time job and I don’t like it.

Productivity

Fell a bit off the planner wagon this week, but did take the time to re-write my master list. I need to do a better job at breaking things down into smaller steps so I can continue on with the slow and steady.